Protecting Industrial Cloud Infrastructure: Strategies Against Cyber Attacks

As the cloud and edge computing continue to merge in the industrial world, new solutions and efficiencies are quickly being established. However, with this rapid rate of growth, what’s often being overlooked are points of exploitation, whereby those with criminal intent could find a weak point in the greater system of connectivity to access sensitive information for malicious purposes.

To give this subject it’s due coverage, the staff at EETimes put together a “Special Project” entitled Protecting the Industrial Cloud from Cyberattacks. From the project’s description:

The following is from the opening section of the project:

In multiple reports from different parts of the cybersecurity industry, data breaches continue to be the top concern in many industries, and flaws in identity and access management (IAM) practices continue to rate among the top avenues for those data breaches.

Despite these reports, and despite the fact that misconfigurations causing security gaps were exploited in two-thirds of attacks reported in a recent cloud security study by Sophos, only a quarter of organizations said a lack of staff expertise is a top concern. Some companies are just not connecting the dots.

More than half of employees working from home do so without new guidelines on how to handle customers’ personally identifiable information (PII), according to an IBM Security study. Yet the study found PII data is exposed in 80 percent of reported security incidents with the most costly consequences. For example, Pfizer reported a huge breach of highly confidential HIPAA-related customer data, stored in automated customer support software on a misconfigured Google Cloud storage bucket.

Our Special Project focuses on vulnerabilities in the industrial cloud, especially for companies with industrial control system (ICS) and operational technology (OT) concerns, and those connected to the IIoT. My introduction explores industrial cloud cybersecurity problems, the consequences for cybersecurity of the shift to cloud, what’s needed to protect the industrial cloud from cyberattacks, what’s currently being done to combat those threats, and what’s not being done yet but should be.

We also examine some real-world attack scenarios and the different avenues for attackers, including home office networks, shadow IT, access controls and third-party threats.

Read the report in full: Protecting the Industrial Cloud from Cyberattacks